Crime: Its Cause and Treatment eBook

jailers condemning and punishing and no crowds shouting
for vengeance. All do wrong and do it over and
over again, and day by day. It is not only those
specific things that the great majority think are
wrong, but the graver offenses that are meant to be
the subject of criminal codes. Of course, codes
do not work out this way in practice. In effect,
they forbid the things that the strongest forces of
the community wish forbidden, things which may or
may not be the gravest and most anti-social acts, but
which at least seem to the strong to be most hostile
to their interests and ruling emotions.

XIX

MEDICAL EXPERTS

So long as the ordinary ideal of punishment prevails,
a crime must consist of an act coupled with an intent
to do the thing, which probably means an intent to
do evil. This is no doubt the right interpretation
of intent, although cases can be found, generally
of a minor grade, which hold that evil intent is not
necessary to the crime. Under the law as generally
laid down, insanity is a defense to crime when the
insanity is so far advanced as to blot out and obliterate
the sense of right and wrong or render the accused
unable to choose the right and avoid the wrong.
Of course, legal definitions of scientific terms, processes,
or things, do not ordinarily show the highest wisdom.
It is safe to say that few judges or lawyers have
ever been students of insanity, of the relation of
“will” to “conduct,” or of
other questions of science or philosophy. Each
man confines himself to his field of operation, and
the love of living does not induce him to go far from
the matter in hand, which to him means the base of
supplies.

The insane are exempted from punishment for crime
on the ground that they are not able to prepare and
attend to their cases when placed on trial and on
the further ground that their “free will”
is destroyed by disease or “something else,”
and therefore they could form no intent. In another
place I have tried to point out the fact that the acts
of the sane and the insane are moved by like causes,
but this is not the theory of the law.

Insanity is often very insidious. Many cases
are easily classified, but there is always the border
line, the twilight zone, which is sure to exist in
moral questions and in all questions of human conduct,
and this is hard to settle. It is generally determined
by the feelings of a jury, moved or not by the prejudice
of the public, depending on whether the community
has been lashed or persuaded to take a hand in the
conduct of the case.